Page 80 of Trick or Treat

One of the women being pulled from her cage looked vaguely familiar. She had long black hair, long legs and walked like a dancer. Oh my God! That was the girl she’d seen flirt with Kurtis at Hillside Cafe when she’d met him for dinner. That was nearly two weeks ago. Had the young woman been here the whole time? Her jeans were dirty, her hair tangled and she held her shirt closed over her chest. One of the men escorting her to the truck reached out and groped her boob hard enough to make the young woman cry out.

Lindsey got to her knees and crawled closer to the front of the cage. Grabbing the bars in each hand, she pressed her head up against the bars, straining to see how many cages there were. From the very little she could see, there were more than she cared to think about. The young woman disappeared into the back of the delivery truck and Lindsey’s stomach dropped. Nothing good could be coming from any of this. Were these people going to harvest their organs and leave them for dead? Were they going to rape them and leave them wishing they were dead? Oh God. What if it was some kind of human trafficking organization? What if they sold her to someone out of the country? How would Trick ever find her?

“Well, well, well. Look who’s up.”

The sound of Kurtis’s voice had Lindsey scrambling backward until she hit the back of the cage, trying to get as far away from him as possible.

“What? Nothing to say?” He was dressed in pressed gray slacks, shiny black dress shoes and a black button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. On anyone else the look would be sexy, but on Kurtis, it only emphasized how little she actually knew the man.

Anger unlike anything she’d ever known spread deep throughout her chest. “It was you! You kidnapped me! You forced me into your stupid van.” Kurtis’s laughter made something snap in Lindsey. “Oh! Did you hit me? What about the woman you shot in the back of your van? Did you dump her on the side of the road?”

“Who?” He truly looked puzzled by her question.

“The woman you said you hit with your van. The woman you shot in the leg so I’d get in with you,” she pushed through clenched teeth.

“Oh! You mean Gert.” He laughed at her obvious puzzlement. He shot to his feet, opened the side door of the van and pulled out the woman he referred to as Gert. He grabbed her by the foot and yanked her out, her head bouncing off the concrete floor. Lindsey flinched in shock. Was the woman dead?

“Lindsey, meet Gert.” He reached down and pulled her up, holding her in front of his own body. As he got closer it was easier to make out Gert’s facial features.

Lindsey gasped.

“Yep. Gert here is a mannequin. A sex doll, actually.” He held his hand next to his face and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Don’t let her know we call her that, though, or she might not put out for my guys anymore.” Kurtis erupted into laughter at his own joke.

“You shot a sex doll in the leg to lure me into your van?” Lindsey couldn’t believe how stupid she’d been.

“Oh, Linds.” He tossed Gert to the floor and stepped over her. “Don’t feel bad. I get a lot of women into my van like that. Just ask Diana.” He tipped his head toward a woman in the cage next to her. Until now, she hadn’t noticed the other woman. She hadn’t made a sound to draw her attention. All Lindsey’s focus had been on what was going on in front of her. The woman lay on her side, staring blankly ahead. She was dressed in tattered, dirty scrubs with a logo from a hospital two towns over on the chest.

Lindsey had a sinking feeling about what was going on here, but she wanted to hear it from Kurtis before she’d believe it. She prayed she was wrong. “What’s going on, Kurtis?”

“What do you mean?” He tipped his head to the side, playing dumb. The look didn’t suit him. His little innocent act wasn’t fooling her and it was pissing her off.

“I mean, what is all this? What are you doing with these women?”

Kurtis dropped down to his haunches, bringing himself down to her level. “Well,all thisis us kidnapping and selling women to whoever has the money.”

“Why?”

“Because it makes me rich.”

Lindsey shook her head in denial. “I don’t understand. How did you get into this sort of thing?” The quiet computer geek who’d tutored her in chemistry was not the same man before her now. How had he come to this?

“Well, let’s see. I got into kidnapping and selling women through a friend I met when I went away to college. I needed money and he told me he knew a way I could get it. Turns out I’m pretty good at it.”

“Human trafficking? Why not use your computer skills? You were amazing at that.” She pulled her legs up and rested her hands on her knees.

“Because I could make ten times the money selling women than I could at any computer job I got. Plus, there’s the added bonus of getting to fuck all the women I want. I have a veritable smorgasbord to choose from.” Lindsey thought she might be sick. Was he really saying he raped as many of the women he kidnapped as he wanted? God, what did he plan to do with her?

Two men opened a cage across from her and went to pull out a curvy redhead. She was wearing a green dress that was torn and dirty and, like Lindsey, her shoes had been taken. She watched on as the woman fought them with everything she had, kicking, screaming, biting. One man held her hands behind her back while the man she’d bitten punched her in the stomach, doubling her over. He waited for her to straighten, then backhanded her, calling her a bitch. The man brought her hands back in front of her and clicked on handcuffs. They each grabbed her under her arms and dragged her away.

“What are you doing with her? Let her go!” Lindsey rose to her knees, fear for the woman causing her heart to race wildly in her chest. When they bypassed the delivery truck, she really got scared.

“Naw. We’re going to have some fun with her.” Kurtis rose to his full height again, looking down on Lindsey. He leaned one hand against the top of the cage and smiled down at her.

“Surely, you know if you bruise or injure the merchandise, you won’t get as much money for them?” She was desperately grasping at anything that might keep him and his men from hurting that woman.

“Surprisingly, no, it doesn’t. As long as we don’t bruise their faces, we can do whatever we want with them.” He laughed and shrugged his shoulder. “We procure them, have a little fun with them, then ship them off to the next destination. They clean them up and make them pretty, then ship them to the buyers.”

“God, you are so sick.” Tears filled her eyes but she refused to let them go. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

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